MANET is one of the protocols I was involved in implementing for a certain network protocol suite back around 2012. Mesh routing protocols only work for the most limited of use cases. They don't know about the capacity of the underlying wireless network and basically fall apart when things are congested or there are radios with poor reception. QoS is implemented far better in modern cell phone networks, and if the routing protocol doesn't take QoS into account, it's gonna suck.
Interesting! If someone with a math background (but not a CS background) wanted to dig deep into learning about mesh networking protocol theory - do you have any recommendations for learning resources or places to get started?
I've long imagined that a content centric mesh network approach would be a better starting point than what we've built up currently, but it seems like such a deep and mysterious subject and I have no idea where to even begin to get started.
I never followed where things went after the contract was complete. Suffice it to say that we only cared about getting the protocol working, as the company was a contract engineering firm doing work for a product that was ultimately for military use. Actually testing it in the real world and improving behaviour was out of scope. We only tested it in a simulated network to make sure that the protocol correctly handled various cases (like certain wireless nodes not being able to see each other due to obstructions).
I had other friends back in the early 2000s working on WiMax, and the hardest part of their work was getting QoS right. More recently (still 10+ years ago), another friend implemented a TCP proxy for a major cell phone provider in the US that used a more wireless friendly congestion control protocol on the wireless network side of things as regular TCP breaks down when latency increases due to reception issues (which gets interpreted as congestion and triggers retransmits). Since the cellular base stations ensured that the wireless network was effectively lossless (albeit with periods of much higher latency), performance for end users increased substantially when the bulk of the TCP retransmits were suppressed.
There's a huge gap between making wireless work vs making it work well. For me, 5G is a step backwards as all the tricks used to push for higher data rates (like larger QAM constellations) make everything worse in rural areas with poor reception: there just isn't a good enough SNR 99% of the time for the new shiny, and the increased power usage does nothing other than drain my phone's battery faster than it did with older LTE. But that is where all the money for research is today.
Ever since 802.11ah devices started appearing I've thought it would be perfect for partnering inside wireless IP cameras... and hell, make them mesh together with something like this so each one configured on your network extends the range of the others in it's area. Streaming 720P H265 is easily doable at the speeds the networks achieve for a few cameras, and the range would be perfect for perimeter monitoring most properties ala farms & industrial parks.
This device however - an entire Raspberry Pi + hat for a router to do..? ... seems like a solution in search of a problem to solve.
A medium range trail/offgrid camera is perfect for this application. All the other solutions in the space are sdcard only, or dependent on some variant of LTE/5G.
I played with HaLow for a while but the only stuff I could get here in the UK was some undocumented crap from AliExpress, anything more robust looking only seems to work in the US. A shame because it’d solve a infrastructure challenge I have to juggle each year
It's worth commenting to me that MeshCore performs much better than Meshtastic at scale and as an emplaced deployment. We have a very active network of about 60 nodes in the Boston area which feels similar to iMessage in deliverability and speed.
But yes, it can't realistically be compared to something like a "real" MANET system with $10k radios that can do something like 100mbps data rates. It is dramatically more accessible and deployable though.
MeshCore is a huge step in the right direction. Especially over Meshtastic which is very poorly designed.
However MeshCore makes one fundamental choice which is severely limiting. It uses a single LoRa discriminator and channel for all nodes. That said, LoRa limitations pretty much force this choice.
This, limits a typical network (3 repeaters) to about 500 messages/hour. The throughput scales inversely by how many repeaters you can hear.
The code does try to adjust down the TX power of a repeater in repeater-dense networks, which probably helps keep throughput consistent for a while.
For these things to work at scale they either need something other than LoRa (which is quite novel, but limited) or they need to figure out how to use LoRa in a way which allows for more channelization.
Until then, the “one transmission at a time on the air” in these very low baud networks is severely limiting.
> Until then, the “one transmission at a time on the air” in these very low baud networks is severely limiting.
Semtech announced recently that their new chips will be able to decode all spread factors on a specific bandwidth and center.
That being said, that would allow new LoRa nodes being capable of listening on effectively 8 different channels (that dont conflict) and transmitting on 1.
Real MANET systems are not defined by their bit rates, but by their ability to take advantages of whatever opportunities for radio communication exist in a given situation.
LoRa has tiny bandwidth. Enough for text messaging if not too many people use it.
HaLow has lots more bandwidth, 433Mbps max, which allows for proper networking. It can bridge to other networks. But the practical range is only 1km. Also, the radios are expensive while LoRa is cheap.
I feel like a HAM license is something of an inevitability of my future, although I don’t have any practical need for one. Catching satellite signals in my backyard is a lot of fun.
I think most hams (myself included) are the type of people whose favorite hobby is collecting more hobbies. Plus, ham radio pairs nicely with tons of other hobbies like electronics, kit building, hiking, solar power, space weather, and (as you say) satellites. I highly recommend it.
I felt the same way a few years ago, and got my license in 2023. I still don't know why, but I don't regret it either. There is a ton to play with in that space, if you're a tinkerer I absolutely encourage you to start studying the license materials. You never know where it'll take you.
The technician license is honestly "good enough" for a lot of people. Particularly now that the digital voice modes allow people to chat across countries through the internet. DMR/SystemFusion/MMDVM are things you might want to research.
If anyone wants to help make MANETs better with TAK… check out opportunities on ditto.com where the team is building crdts and using them to help enable SAR. Say Turner sent you in your application if it looks interesting. Particularly the FDE role.
Can design then export routes from any geospatial tool like CalTopo, AllTrails, or even WinTAK directly to your ATAK device. Then in ATAK you can use it basically as something like AllTrails on steroids, including offline map caching, route guidance, markers, tracking etc... even geotagged photos. This can be synced across multiple devices among friends using a TAK server. It can also be used for off grid communications and tracking between hikers via something like Meshtastic, which I use fairly regularly with my partner out camping well outside of cellular coverage.
ATAK is not necessarily the most intuitive UI, but it's crazy powerful for doing basically anything outdoors.
Last time I played with Moremicro they didn't work with real 802.11s and had some hokey proprietary hierarchal tree topology that required a main basestation gateway. ad-hoc, peer-to-peer was broken. They finally fixed their driver?
> This technology is especially useful in the civilian space for search and rescue, disaster response, airsoft events, and any disconnected communications scenario.
MANET is one of the protocols I was involved in implementing for a certain network protocol suite back around 2012. Mesh routing protocols only work for the most limited of use cases. They don't know about the capacity of the underlying wireless network and basically fall apart when things are congested or there are radios with poor reception. QoS is implemented far better in modern cell phone networks, and if the routing protocol doesn't take QoS into account, it's gonna suck.
Interesting! If someone with a math background (but not a CS background) wanted to dig deep into learning about mesh networking protocol theory - do you have any recommendations for learning resources or places to get started?
I've long imagined that a content centric mesh network approach would be a better starting point than what we've built up currently, but it seems like such a deep and mysterious subject and I have no idea where to even begin to get started.
I never followed where things went after the contract was complete. Suffice it to say that we only cared about getting the protocol working, as the company was a contract engineering firm doing work for a product that was ultimately for military use. Actually testing it in the real world and improving behaviour was out of scope. We only tested it in a simulated network to make sure that the protocol correctly handled various cases (like certain wireless nodes not being able to see each other due to obstructions).
I had other friends back in the early 2000s working on WiMax, and the hardest part of their work was getting QoS right. More recently (still 10+ years ago), another friend implemented a TCP proxy for a major cell phone provider in the US that used a more wireless friendly congestion control protocol on the wireless network side of things as regular TCP breaks down when latency increases due to reception issues (which gets interpreted as congestion and triggers retransmits). Since the cellular base stations ensured that the wireless network was effectively lossless (albeit with periods of much higher latency), performance for end users increased substantially when the bulk of the TCP retransmits were suppressed.
There's a huge gap between making wireless work vs making it work well. For me, 5G is a step backwards as all the tricks used to push for higher data rates (like larger QAM constellations) make everything worse in rural areas with poor reception: there just isn't a good enough SNR 99% of the time for the new shiny, and the increased power usage does nothing other than drain my phone's battery faster than it did with older LTE. But that is where all the money for research is today.
Wireless is complicated.
Ever since 802.11ah devices started appearing I've thought it would be perfect for partnering inside wireless IP cameras... and hell, make them mesh together with something like this so each one configured on your network extends the range of the others in it's area. Streaming 720P H265 is easily doable at the speeds the networks achieve for a few cameras, and the range would be perfect for perimeter monitoring most properties ala farms & industrial parks.
This device however - an entire Raspberry Pi + hat for a router to do..? ... seems like a solution in search of a problem to solve.
A medium range trail/offgrid camera is perfect for this application. All the other solutions in the space are sdcard only, or dependent on some variant of LTE/5G.
In case anybody is like me and didn't know what Wi-Fi HaLow is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11ah
All modules seem to be us-only. Is there a modules usable in eu frequency?
The airtime restrictions make it pretty much useless in the EU
This guy has been promoting and hacking hardware around this project heavily the last few months: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=550fh2n5rUs
That guy is not contributing to the open source project.
Which is why OP says ”around” the project? Never claimed he is a contributor to the code.
I wonder if you could air drop these at some location, it wouldn't last long but way to deploy the nodes.
I played with HaLow for a while but the only stuff I could get here in the UK was some undocumented crap from AliExpress, anything more robust looking only seems to work in the US. A shame because it’d solve a infrastructure challenge I have to juggle each year
MANETs: back from the dead!? The problem is not the hardware, but the software; apparently, nobody can think of a killer application.
Meshtastic has been popular, but relies upon a terrible implementation of a mesh -- and it's vastly oversold on its capabilities.
I understand some hams run a meshtastic repeater primarily to convince meshtastic users to become hams.
It's worth commenting to me that MeshCore performs much better than Meshtastic at scale and as an emplaced deployment. We have a very active network of about 60 nodes in the Boston area which feels similar to iMessage in deliverability and speed.
But yes, it can't realistically be compared to something like a "real" MANET system with $10k radios that can do something like 100mbps data rates. It is dramatically more accessible and deployable though.
MeshCore is a huge step in the right direction. Especially over Meshtastic which is very poorly designed.
However MeshCore makes one fundamental choice which is severely limiting. It uses a single LoRa discriminator and channel for all nodes. That said, LoRa limitations pretty much force this choice.
This, limits a typical network (3 repeaters) to about 500 messages/hour. The throughput scales inversely by how many repeaters you can hear.
The code does try to adjust down the TX power of a repeater in repeater-dense networks, which probably helps keep throughput consistent for a while.
For these things to work at scale they either need something other than LoRa (which is quite novel, but limited) or they need to figure out how to use LoRa in a way which allows for more channelization.
Until then, the “one transmission at a time on the air” in these very low baud networks is severely limiting.
> Until then, the “one transmission at a time on the air” in these very low baud networks is severely limiting.
Semtech announced recently that their new chips will be able to decode all spread factors on a specific bandwidth and center.
That being said, that would allow new LoRa nodes being capable of listening on effectively 8 different channels (that dont conflict) and transmitting on 1.
Oh that sounds quite nice, thanks for sharing!
Real MANET systems are not defined by their bit rates, but by their ability to take advantages of whatever opportunities for radio communication exist in a given situation.
LoRa has tiny bandwidth. Enough for text messaging if not too many people use it.
HaLow has lots more bandwidth, 433Mbps max, which allows for proper networking. It can bridge to other networks. But the practical range is only 1km. Also, the radios are expensive while LoRa is cheap.
I feel like a HAM license is something of an inevitability of my future, although I don’t have any practical need for one. Catching satellite signals in my backyard is a lot of fun.
I think most hams (myself included) are the type of people whose favorite hobby is collecting more hobbies. Plus, ham radio pairs nicely with tons of other hobbies like electronics, kit building, hiking, solar power, space weather, and (as you say) satellites. I highly recommend it.
I felt the same way a few years ago, and got my license in 2023. I still don't know why, but I don't regret it either. There is a ton to play with in that space, if you're a tinkerer I absolutely encourage you to start studying the license materials. You never know where it'll take you.
The technician license is honestly "good enough" for a lot of people. Particularly now that the digital voice modes allow people to chat across countries through the internet. DMR/SystemFusion/MMDVM are things you might want to research.
Having used Mestastic recently but ignorant of the details, what are some of issues with its mesh implementation?
The killer application in this case is ATAK.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_Team_Awareness_Kit
If anyone wants to help make MANETs better with TAK… check out opportunities on ditto.com where the team is building crdts and using them to help enable SAR. Say Turner sent you in your application if it looks interesting. Particularly the FDE role.
Is ATAK even useful to civilians? Is it trustworthy?
Yes and yes, we've used it for civilian Search & Rescue in tandem with CalTopo.
I use it for hiking, its great.
How do you use it for that?
Can design then export routes from any geospatial tool like CalTopo, AllTrails, or even WinTAK directly to your ATAK device. Then in ATAK you can use it basically as something like AllTrails on steroids, including offline map caching, route guidance, markers, tracking etc... even geotagged photos. This can be synced across multiple devices among friends using a TAK server. It can also be used for off grid communications and tracking between hikers via something like Meshtastic, which I use fairly regularly with my partner out camping well outside of cellular coverage.
ATAK is not necessarily the most intuitive UI, but it's crazy powerful for doing basically anything outdoors.
It is an offline moving map with very fancy marker etc support. Seems a good choice for a hiking app?
I use MorseMicro in 802.11s mode successfully, just openwrt stuff, any reason to try this project ?
Last time I played with Moremicro they didn't work with real 802.11s and had some hokey proprietary hierarchal tree topology that required a main basestation gateway. ad-hoc, peer-to-peer was broken. They finally fixed their driver?
The tree mesh thing you're thinking of is actually just EasyMesh (it's a standard!). We're using prplmesh.
But yes, 11s Mesh also works. Let us know on the forum (https://community.morsemicro.com/) or via github (https://github.com/MorseMicro/) if you're having issues. Err, I work for Morse in case that wasn't clear.
I believe yes, give them other try, my scenarios with one connected station and mesh on drone platforms works out of the box
In Europe still struggle.
> This technology is especially useful in the civilian space for search and rescue, disaster response, airsoft events, and any disconnected communications scenario.
Airsoft?! Huh?
Radio communication is a critical advantage in actual infantry fights, so it makes sense that it would be useful for cosplay infantry fights.